Using latest TKL File Server version (I think-- which is using Ubuntu 10.04.1 and Webmin 1.560 and Samba 3.4.7). I have problems with people using Samba (using Windows 7) over FTPS-not local to the network (using Expandrive http://www.expandrive.com/ ) getting very slow performance in accessing folders. These are folders with large numbers of jpegs and because of the application, the people are using their File Explorer with the View Thumbnails options (to see the various JPEGs for inclusion in webpages). They take awhile for the files to come up. I've enabled the read prediction (in the Samba misc options), but is there anything to do to make this work faster?

Is there some Linux program or process I can have running on the server which will prepopulate (certain) folders with thumbnails for the JPEGs contained within so the folders will present themselves faster?

Is this simply a bandwidth problem or a local computer processing problem (look for better cache options on the local machines)? Or might this be a problem with something going on the Expandrive FTPS?

Any advice would be appreciated. If anyone needs any other info required from me to get this to work better, let me know and I will get you the info ASAP.

But perhaps there are some options for caching (ie on the Win7 clients) that would improve performance? I would suspect that it's partially a network bandwidth issue and partially something to do with how Win7 does thumbnail caching. To be sure though you'll need to do some testing.

OTOH SSH/SFTP is generally slower than other (non-encrypted) network connections simply because of the encryption. Have you compared it to using Samba shares? Although, I have read that Win7 can be slow when accessing Samba shares anyway (compared to Linux or WinXP).

Assuming that the users are consistant (ie the same users on the same computers) then you write a script or implement some sort of sync setup to sync the remote location to the local filesystem. That would radically improve performance (as the user would be actually browsing their local filesystem).